In 2014, the Government of Indonesia issued the new Village Law to finance development based on local needs and priorities for the country’s 74,093 villages. The Law aims to contribute to poverty reduction and make village leadership more accountable, by authorising the direct election of a village head and providing villages with a guaranteed annual transfer and authority over decision-making for participatory village development.

The Directorate General for Village Government, Bina Pemdes, in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA) was mandated to strengthen the capacity of village governments to effectively administer the Village Law. In 2015, Bina Pemdes delivered training to 239,000 representatives from the village apparatus. In 2016, training was piloted for sub-district government officials with support from KOMPAK, an Australia-Indonesia Government partnership working to reduce poverty in Indonesia.

To support the delivery of training to village officials, KOMPAK partnered with Pulse Lab Jakarta on a project to explore alternative and flexible training models. As a result, the project developed a post-training simulation game, called Sekolah Desa, as a creative way to reinforce the training modules, test knowledge and identify learning gaps.